


If Genesis had been rational

by Lilly_White



Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VII
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-03
Updated: 2016-05-03
Packaged: 2018-06-06 04:44:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,580
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6738658
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilly_White/pseuds/Lilly_White
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What if, instead of randomly thrusting an apple at Sephiroth’s face in the Nibelheim reactor, Genesis had tried to be helpful? (This is AU-ish in that Genesis’ degradation didn’t actually affect his brain, so he’s still capable of coherent thought and persuasion.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	If Genesis had been rational

“Calm down. Calm down, please. I can’t – ”

Sephiroth’s wrists were trembling so hard in Genesis’ grip that the redhead had to squeeze harder than he would’ve thought possible before breaking the man’s bones – but he would do anything, anything to stop this horrifying absence of self-control on Sephiroth’s part.

“I can’t be the same as these monsters,” the General gasped, eyes wheeling, and it did more than break Genesis’ heart to see this degree of distress in his old friend’s face – this face he’d seen, bloodied and bruised from countless battles, eyes glazed over after having been desensitized to death and massacre since he was a child; he was nowhere near that type of detachment now. This was a man who believed in the absurdity of all things, who was always slightly removed from events, incapable of asserting himself in a reality he didn’t fully understand – but now, feeling was pouring from him freely, as if the truth had had the effect of a dagger being pulled up his abdomen, letting out an entire life’s worth of repressed anxieties in a shiny pink mess.

“Let’s get out of here,” Genesis said, nodding at a confused Zack. “He can carry on the investigation. I can explain everything to you, you just have to listen – ”

“No,” Sephiroth muttered, and then he’d pushed Genesis away in a wild, uncontrolled gesture. “I can’t – these men, they were tortured, Genesis, subjected to Mako treatments of lethally high dosages and it’s all Hojo’s doing – what do you think he’s been doing to those closer to home, if he’s capable of this much horror just for the sake of human betterment? What do you think he did to us?”

“I have your answers,” Genesis urged his friend. “If you come with me to the next room, I’ve got some cigarettes, we can just sit on some of the warm Mako pipelines and relax, and I’ll tell you all about it. It’s alright. It’s going to be alright.”

“Don’t you coddle me,” Sephiroth all but growled, but the redhead hardly looked impressed.

“Goddess be damned, I will coddle you if you keep up this attitude,” he bit out. “Is it really so hard for you to accept the fact that I might know more than you do, this time, that I might have the answers that you so desperately need? Is that why you’re being like this? Just because you can’t stand to be the ignorant one for once?”

Sephiroth’s glare was ice-cold and it took all of Genesis’ will to bear it, trying to tell himself that he was being cruel for his friend’s benefit.

“You’ve got some nerve,” Sephiroth muttered.

“You know me,” Genesis replied with a tentative smile, that Sephiroth did not reciprocate. 

*

The silver Zippo snapped open in Genesis’ expert fingers; he could’ve just as easily synthesized a flame from his ever-faithful Fire materia, but he liked the gesture of flipping a Zippo open too much to resort to magic. It was one of many of his small vanities, and Sephiroth found it oddly comforting to see Genesis perpetuate such a familiar gesture when every single certainty he’d ever held about his own life had just been rattled out of its socket.

“What is it that you’re so afraid of, exactly?” Genesis asked as the silver-haired Soldier inhaled sweet smoke.

“I’ll tell you what I should be afraid of,” the First Class replied. “Smoking in a Mako reactor – not sure whether that’s particularly intelligent.”

“Probably not,” Genesis smiled, glad to see that his friend had calmed down enough for rational dialogue. He flipped the Zippo shut again with a satisfying click, waiting for Sephiroth to start – pushing the man would probably only trigger that terrible anxiety all over again.

“It’s those – things,” Sephiroth took up after a few seconds, eyes becoming a little vague again as he began visualizing the creatures in the next room again. “Those monsters – ”

“What about them?”

Sephiroth glanced over at his friend, a little bewildered at the man’s nonchalance as he leaned back, throat extended, smoke seeping from his lips and curling in the green Mako haze.

“They were – well, manufactured.”

“No,” Genesis replied quite matter-of-factly. “They were transformed. The only thing going on in that room is the chemical result of willing human subjects being exposed to Mako for a prolonged period of time – not some kind of evil monster factory.”

“We were willingly subjected to Mako, too,” Sephiroth said. “Doesn’t it strike you as slightly worrying that none of the information supplied by the Science Department ever suggested that Mako treatment could transform a human body to that extent?”

“What is so horrifying about them?” Genesis asked.

Again, Sephiroth stared at that pale face, framed as it was by white and red strands, blue eyes almost mischievous in their inquiry. Oh, he was doing that thing – that willingly obtuse questioning that he put his friends through whenever he had a point to make that required the deconstruction of most of his interlocutor’s assumptions and prejudices. Granted, it was terribly asinine, but also quite educative in some case – however, he should’ve seen that right now wasn’t exactly the appropriate time.

“You’re asking me what is so horrifying about human beings signing up for tests whose nature and risks were never fully disclosed to them, and then being trapped in this transformative stasis for years on end? You’re asking me what is wrong with human experimentation, whether it was consensual or not?”

“Oh, of course that’s all very wrong, morality, ethics, yadda yadda yadda,” Genesis waved away Sephiroth’s argument with a bewilderingly casual hand flip. “That isn’t what’s interesting. That’s the basic view that society pushes onto us and that we all generally agree upon. We mustn’t play God, because it’s wrong, and especially because we’ll fuck it up at some point, being the imperfect creatures that we are.” Here he turned to Sephiroth again, blue eyes sparking with curiosity. “What I’m interested in, is why you’re afraid of these particular monsters. Why you’re afraid now, when you’ve always known that ShinRa dabbled in human experimentation – even if it was to a lesser degree than this. And you’ve already seen your fair share of monsters, not to mention those with my face and Angeal’s on their throats.”

Sephiroth’s throat was dry; he licked his lips vaguely as he searched for an answer to that question, seeking some kind of rational explanation for the horrifying feeling he had of his guts being twisting into knots.

“I’ll tell you what you’re afraid of,” Genesis offered when Sephiroth had been silently thinking for a full minute, the whites of his eyes becoming apparent again as he fretfully grasped at his reason with fear-tangled fingers. The redhead got up to distract him, hopping to a thick horizontal chain that hung nearby and balancing there with all the grace of a funambulist.

“Transformation,” he intoned, voice echoing dramatically in the vast chamber of the reactor that opened beneath his feet in a green-tinted chasm. Then there was a crack like breaking bones, and feathers spilling from Genesis’ back as Sephiroth watched numbly – and a handful of seconds later, a gigantic wing was spanning across the hall, rising out of Genesis’ back and caressing the thrumming pipelines all around them.

“You’re afraid of otherness. This alienation from what you define yourself as. That’s how you view those transformed humans, don’t you? They are alienated from what you would define as their true form – their sentient, coherent, human form.”

“In broad terms, I suppose you could put it that way.”

“I’ll tell you what I think. I think that these transformations are our truest possible form. We are pathetically cautious creatures, always trying to set ourselves above something, to seek definition through negatives. The very concept of otherness is as essential as the backdrop of a play is to the actors; we need it in order to feel real by comparison. I don’t know what I am, but I know that I am definitely not that. Like light needs shadow to exist, we need contrast, we need something slightly unbelievable, something terrifying but just out of reach, just outside of what we deem to be irrefutably real so that we can feel comfort in our own ‘normal’ bodies, in our own vainly polished shoes. We make it our mission in life to protect ourselves from the dark; and thus we seek comfort, even if that means entrapment, as long as the dark is on the other side of the walls.”

“That wing is not a part of you,” Sephiroth argued, throat tight. “It’s an unnatural mutation – ”

“Indeed, it isn’t,” Genesis agreed. “It’s some part of the grotesque Other, as though the shadow had lain a hand on my shoulder and stained my body. But in doing so, it made me realize that none of us are actually pure at all. None of us are who we claim to be. We only advance, shaking off the shadow’s grip and pretending it isn’t real, that the nightmares aren’t real, because it would be too terrifying to consider the alternative. We can’t imagine that we are the same colour as the backdrop of the play - that we aren’t distinguishable from it at all. Because then, how could we keep our sense of self, if that very sense depends on the difference between us and the shadows, between us and the grotesque?”

Sephiroth frowned. “Wait; you said this was your truest form. Why?”

Genesis smiled thoughtfully at his friend. “I have accepted that I am made of the same stuff as the Other that we fear so much. That I am not different from the darkness. I am a deformed, grotesque thing, and I suppose I always have been – after all, was I not an Other in your eyes? In the eyes of all who beheld me? I have simply taken on the appropriate form, and am no longer lying to myself about who I am.”

“Then how do you form your sense of self, if you don’t differentiate yourself from the Other?”

Genesis’ fingers slid a thin leatherbound book from his pocket, waving it at his friend, and Sephiroth felt almost stupid for not having guessed.

“I identify myself with people, characters, things that resonate with me. I don’t seek difference, but similarity,” he replied. “Empathy is our saving grace. If you can’t see yourself, just place mirrors all around yourself – you’re bound to see something reflecting back at you.”

“But, wait. How can you empathize with others, when you have no identity to compare to theirs? It would be impossible for you to deem whether their identity has similarities with your ownthat you can appreciate and empathize with, since you have technically lost yours.”

Genesis smiled softly. “We are a collage of genetic predispositions, childhood education, memories. There is always something left even when we feel our sense of self slipping from our grasp. The difference between that collage and our identity, is that the former is a foundation that we cannot access, and the latter is something we personally created. We are constantly trying to keep it in a firm grasp, control its transformations, worry that it is in fact unique and somehow more legitimate than everyone else’s.”

“I still don’t understand what you’re trying to say with all of this,” Sephiroth said with a shake of his head.

“You’re having an identity crisis,” Genesis replied quite calmly. “You can’t differentiate yourself from those monsters, and since your entire sense of self has been constructed upon you being better and purer than these things, you don’t know how to hold onto it now that you see that you’re no different from them. To you, identifying with those grotesque humans would mean that you’ve been defining yourself wrongly all this time.”

“I don’t see how anybody could stand the idea that their entire life has been a lie.”

“But how has your life been a lie, Sephiroth?” Genesis asked him. “The only lie was Hojo’s voluntary omission concerning your origins. But you are still the Sephiroth I knew; I see you as I have always seen you. You aren’t becoming less real or less concerned with the lives of the men around you simply because you can no longer recognize yourself. It is absolutely imperative that you trust me, now, in this moment - that you trust all of those that you considered as friends, and acknowledge that we have been safeguarding your identity ever since you gave us access to it. If you can’t trust your own definition of yourself - then trust ours. Please. Trust us.”

Sephiroth thought for a long moment after that, letting a silence settle as he considered all that Genesis had said. The redhead finished his cigarette while he waited, hoping his friend wouldn’t see just how terrified he was that he hadn’t been able to put his point across as well as he’d hoped, and that he’d subsequently lose Sephiroth to some kind of madness. 

“And here I was thinking that the only book you’d ever read was Loveless,” the silver-haired man ventured quietly after a while, and Genesis’ insides soared with relief.

“I can make my own theories too, you know. I don’t just spend my time mindlessly plagiarizing other people’s ideas.”

“Well…”

The redhead grinned. “Do you really want to continue that thought? If I remember correctly, you and I need quite a lot of room to spar – but I have no qualms whatsoever about reducing this place to ashes if it does come to that.”

“I never challenged you.”

“You were on the brink of a challenge just there.”

“No I wasn’t. You’re just ridiculously susceptible.”

Finely plucked eyebrows shot up. “You should really stop talking if you want this place to remain standing.”

Zack’s voice rang out just as Sephiroth seemed to consider whether or not it would be worth provoking his old friend – “Everything alright out here?”

“Yeah,” Genesis called back. “How do you guys feel about heading back to the mansion? There’s still quite a lot of studying that we need to do. And, I still have a lot of answers to give you, Sephiroth. I just wanted to be sure that the information that’s been kept from us wasn’t just dumped on you without you being prepared for it, like Hollander dumped the truth on me.”

“You do know that you’re like one of ShinRa’s most wanted targets at the moment,” Zack called down at his fellow First, and Genesis only smirked.

“One of the most wanted, or the most wanted?”

“You wouldn’t be satisfied by anything less, would you?” Zack shot back, still a little wary and not knowing what to expect from this man – but he was pretty shaken about discovering those Mako-mutants, too, and after listening to the two Firsts’ exchange from the doorway, he felt that he would be betraying his own integrity as a Soldier if he just went on blindly with the mission without having a few of his own questions answered.

“Right, truce for now then I suppose,” Zack said. “I’m following you guys out. You alright, Sephiroth?”

“Yes,” Sephiroth replied dismissively, accepting Genesis’ proffered hand and letting himself be pulled up by his comrade. Then he added, in a low voice, as if to reassure himself as the three of them fell into stride with one another as if this was a perfectly normal mission;

“Yes … I’m fine.”


End file.
